She made a little grimace, and then raised her elbows, slightly lifting her shoulders. “As it shall please you, Senor. But he is gone--thees passion. Yess--what you shall call thees sentiment of lof--zo--as he came!” She threw her fingers in the air as if to illustrate the volatile and transitory passage of her affections, and then turned again to Joan with her back towards Demorest. “Do please go on--Dona Rosita,” said he, “I never heard the real story. If there is any romance about my house, I'd like to know it,” he added with a faint sigh. Dona Rosita wheeled upon him with an inquiring little look. “Ah, you have the sentiment, and YOU,” she continued, taking Joan by the arms, “YOU have not. Eet ess good so. When a--the wife,” she continued boldly, hazarding an extended English abstraction, “he has the sentimente and the hoosband he has nothing, eet is not good--for a-him--ze wife,” she concluded triumphantly. “But I have great appreciation and I am dying to hear it,” said Demorest, trying to laugh. “Well, poor one, you look so. But you shall lif till another time,” said Dona Rosita, with a mock courtesy, gliding with Joan away. The “other time” came that evening when chocolate was served on the veranda, where Dona Rosita, mantilla-draped against the dry, clear, moonlit air, sat at the feet of Joan on the lowest step. Demorest, uneasily observant of the influence of the giddy foreigner on his wife, and conscious of certain confidences between them from which he was excluded, leaned against a pillar of the porch in half abstracted resignation; Joan, under the tutelage of Rosita, lit a cigarette; Demorest gazed at her wonderingly, trying to recall, in her fuller and more animated face, some memory of the pale, refined profile of the Puritan girl he had first met in the Boston train, the faint aurora of whose cheek in that northern clime seemed to come and go with his words. Becoming conscious at last of the eyes of Dona Rosita watching him from below, with an effort he recalled his duty as her host and gallantly reminded her that moonlight and the hour seemed expressly fitted for her promised love story. “Do tell it,” said Joan, “I don't mind hearing it again.” “Then you know it already?” said Demorest, surprised. Joan took the cigarette from her lips, laughed complacently, and exchanged a familiar glance with Rosita. “She told it me a year ago, when we first knew each other,” she replied. “Go on, dear,” to Rosita.